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I have been posting in favour of the Sandbox's existence and I have 2 sites firmly stuck in the sand!
However...
2 weeks ago I registered a brand new domain and started to build a new site. I knew it would be at least 6 months before anything happened but..
This morning it entered the index for the first time - straight on page one for a one word search (a town, granted only 194,000 matches) but none the less the last 2 sites still cannot achieve similar results after 6 months.
Also preliminary early pages ranking very well
The site has only one incoming link, no adsense, banners or anything, vanilla html etc.
Built as per my last 2 sites so clearly something has changed!
Regards and hope to all
Rod
Google has plenty of room, they can just keep adding those 2^32 bit indexes one after another like it looks like they've been doing. The trick is getting into the first one. For the math challenged here, of which there appear to be a few too many, the current index count is 2 * 2^32 roughly. It doubled overnight. They didn't find these pages overnight, the old junk in that index proves that. Do they teach math in high school anymore?
That's what's so absurd about saying there is no sandbox. Of course there is no sandbox, it's a word used to describe the effects of what they are doing. It's pretty accurate, so it caught on. The fact that some sites can escape being downgraded in no way proves that this particular algo tweak[s] doesn't exist, it proves that the thing can be bypassed in certain circumstances.
But because they clearly are having difficulty organizing the world's information nowadays, maybe it's time to change the company slogan to something like 'maximizing our IPO stock sales as the law allows us to begin selling off our ten times overvalued stocks before the market wakes up and stops valuing that junk the way it is'. Or, what it looks like when money takes over engineering as a primary force.
Or maybe they can say this: well, we liked the old results and sites we had indexed so much we decided to just stick with those and not let any new stuff in anymore, after all, everyone loves us, we have a good company name. Hmm. Lots of possibilities.
Re the overoptimization penalty:
try it, I did, deliberately. Page dropped out of serps, pr 0 from 4 or 5. De-optimized, after a while pr returned, serps returned. Over optimize at your own risk. Only that page experienced pr 0 on the site, nothing else changed. That's about as scientific as you can get with a sample of one, but it's good enough for me.
<<< It has also been repeated over and over again that this so called sandbox is not absolute. It does not, and never has, applied to all new sites. It does apply to a far greater percentage of new sites than ever, which all by itself should be very informative. IMO, a variation of it applies to older sites too...or maybe not. Hmmmm...what if it's the same rules? ;-)>>>
I've suspected the same set of rules, with the same internal requirement driving them for quite a while. Only this requirement is not an improvement, it's a hack, and a way to boost income, and maintain that income until at least the grace period passes and they can start selling their shares. This process started roughly in last november from what I can see. It increased in severity the closer to the IPO they got. Profits for the last quarter relevant to the IPO were record high. If this is confusing to you maybe it's time to take a few business classes. Thus one set of rules was used to deal with what probably was, and may still be, an internal messup, overload, etc, and to maximize income for this period. Both were reasonably successful. The reason people here are annoyed is that despite all claims otherwise, this is pretty obviously not done to improve the engineering of their product, so of course people get annoyed at how bad the product is getting. Pretty natural. If not here, where should this type of issue be discussed? None of my friends have any interest in the question, except when they notice google serps degenerate randomly of course.
It was good enough for me shortly after Florida, when we did the same thing...though the details varied a bit.
And it's still good enough for me. Problem now is that it's a hecka lot easier to set the darned thing off.
A hecka lot easier.
And even worse, when you do set it off, you don't just get to just pop right back in after you fix it. Now that really isn't playing fair. How are we supposed to figure out the darned algo when they pull stuff like that?
:-)
So much that 6 months later when it came out of the sandbox suddenly, the traffic was so massive it crashed my server over and over again and my host shut the site down.
Then the site got instantly banned because the site was shut down. Stupid google! From one extreme to the next!
[edited by: Spine at 5:52 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]
Also, I don't see anymore "Supplimental Results" anymore?
Two sites of mine which were URL only for the last 8 weeks have reappeared in the last 12 hours, and every page is Supplemental.
Truly bizarre!
DerekH
However it is deja vu, just change the names and the dates.
[websitepublisher.net...]
[pcworld.com...]Minnapple that is quite spooky :)
(Everyone should check these links BTW)
a)Disgruntled people who feel they've been treated harshly by the sanbox filter may concentrate more on optimisimng for Yahoo and MSN Search in turn this new focus could bring a move in the money spent on Adwords to Overture and it'll only be time before MSN Search ditches Overture for thier own model (if anyone's has heard any rumours I'd be interested to hear what people think may happen in the future)
b) Keeping good fresh content out of your index can detract from the quality of the search results emmensly, you can only keep doing this for so long if the competition is getting better all the time... Searchers could start moving in mass to other search options.
For my own personal moan, I've seen a few of my clients who are established companies have their web sites stuck in the sand box. Whilst the sites were new, the companies are well established are were just slow moving into the idea of a web site and intenet based side to their business. These would be valuable additions to the Google SEPRS but can NOT get any rank of note whilst I have to endure the biggest load of crap shopping sites (in my opinion) and the likes all the time in search results!
Take all the technical chat away a minute lets just talk common sense and logic ..... surely the guys at Google can see the things we are seeing and many have commented on it here! The money men have the power I guess now!
I bet it would rank very well, new site or not. People say here that their site has good links in, the reality is that they forced the links and google can spot that.
Sandbox is a symptom, not a cause. The cure is credibility, which you can fake or naturally acquire. Eitherway, its credibility percieved by google's rules.
The AV comparison is misguided IMHO. The big factor was their page design/speed and cluttered image. The google model was far more appealing and still is.
lizardx ... if you comments have weight I can only summerise that Google can't keep this up for much longer cos the Yahoo competition and pending MSN search is going to increase the pressure on Google from two fronts
Have you looked at Yahoo! SERPs recently?
The recent update is yielding very good results indeed... I for one am very impressed (after months of annoying 301 redirect issues).
There is no sandbox there - they are picking up changes and ranking quite quickly.
MSN Beta is incredibly fast...
